


for you are alone unto the ending of the world

by TheElusiveBadger



Series: a goat farm under the Wakandan sun [1]
Category: Captain America - All Media Types, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Character Death, Dog Tags, F/M, Goats, Grief/Mourning, Jewish Bucky Barnes, Jewish Steve Rogers, Judaism, M/M, Not A Fix-It, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-01
Updated: 2018-05-01
Packaged: 2019-04-29 05:14:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,031
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14465799
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheElusiveBadger/pseuds/TheElusiveBadger
Summary: *Spoilers for Infinity War*Bucky joked with Steve one morning, under the light of the Wakandan sun in mid-March, that he should give up everything to remain on his little goat farm. The thought never occurred to him, with Bucky healing and content and semi-stable, that there'd soon be nothing left to give up.*Spoilers for Infinity War*





	for you are alone unto the ending of the world

He arrives at the hut within two hours. The goats bleat, desperate for food, and there are a few that lay, unmoving, with limbs bent and twisted in unnatural positions. The dog aliens had run through here, Steve thinks, through the fences that Bucky took hours to build, through the piles of hay and feed, through the garden of vegetables and fruits. They’d come through and they’d—

He doesn’t finish the thought. His lungs feel tight as he opens the door to the hut. There are ashes in his right palm, and no children in the circular room that serves as a living room. They’d come in every morning, for a year and a half, Bucky’d told him once after he’d gotten up the courage to call and ask Steve to come. “They like to braid my hair,” Bucky said with a wry half-grin and a shrug. “They’re good kids. Not scared of the big bad wolf.”

Steve stands in the doorway for a long moment and takes in the room. It’s untouched, as if war had never come to Wakanda. Had never laid its harsh, uncaring hands upon Earth. The pile of well-worn books on the long plank of wood that serves as a table still sits, stacked by size, next to the coffee cup Steve brought back with him from Lebanon, after a mission nine months ago. The throw blanket over the couch Shuri wouldn’t let Bucky say no to, and the kitchenette with its neat pile of pots, pans, and dishes. On top of the Tanakh lay dog tags.

 _Bucky’s_ , Steve thinks, and reaches up with his left hand to rub at the place where they used to hang on an abrasive chain around his neck. The material used to drive itself across his skin till it was fire engine red instead of Irish pale whenever he’d run. Steve’s are gone—Hydra’d taken them off Bucky long ago and burned them for scrap metal.

Steve takes a deep breath, and shudders. One step, then two, across the floor where there’s no dirt because Bucky keep it meticulously clean (just like Winifred, Steve remembers) even with one arm, but no complaints. Never complaints. By the sixth step, his legs give out, and he collapses next to the table. His forehead hits the edge hard, the corner digging into his skin, and he thinks he can feel beads of blood well up and mix with the grime and dirt and enemies’ torn remains and—

  _Ash_. The ash. The fucking ash, and there’d been no time for this last time in the trenches, when all he could see was Hydra burning to the ground and empty bottles that failed in the only duty they possessed, and there’s no time _now_. Thor is somewhere out there, swearing revenge at the sky, and Shuri and Okoye are trying to pick up the pieces left over because T’Challa’s gone, too, but all Steve hears is that last moment. The last time he’d ever say his name. How scared and confused it sounded.

 Steve sits there, tears silent down his cheeks, and wants his mother. He wants his mother, but she’s dust in the ground, and he wants the Barnes’, but they wouldn’t have deserved to see this. Didn’t deserve to know what became of their only son. He bends his head as he twists around, back against the table, hair hitting the surface, and stares. The position isn’t comfortable, it pulls at his throat, especially as the sobs wrack through his body, but Steve’s beyond caring. His right palm clutches at the remains, and he swears he can feel them disappear, even as he holds them close.

 Steve wants Sam, too, but Sam is gone, and his stomach clenches, because he doesn’t want to think about it, doesn’t want to acknowledge it, but denial is not an old friend.

 He whimpers and doesn’t move. If he closes his eyes, he’ll see it again, and he’ll see Wanda as she fades away, and there’s nothing he can do. Steve has fought, and fought, and he’d never been prepared for this. Erskine had made his body strong, but Steve feels like that frail, broken man whose body hated itself once again, numb and unable to move.

 There’s no time, he thinks.

           

 

 

He wakes up in a one-room apartment in Vinegar Hill. There’s a stained bucket filled with water to boil next to a stove that barely lit whenever you set a match to it, and a couch that smelled like dust and mildew. One of the legs is broken and held up by a stack of old newspapers collected from dumpsters. The ratty old blanket his mam had dragged with her from Dublin is across his shoulders like a shroud, and Bucky sits on the coffee table, a worried look in his blue eyes. He looks tired, Steve thinks, and takes in the suspenders down around his hips, the brunette locks sticking up, and the dark circles.

He’s got a book clenched in his palms, and when he sees Steve looking at him, he lets a half-smile form. “We were just getting to the good part,” Bucky quips, holding up the book. “You need to stop falling asleep on me, punk.”

There’s a shirt hanging over the window. If Steve focuses, he’ll see the round stains of blood that will never leave the white fabric. In a few days, that shirt will be on his back as he loses his job at the grocery store, and Sarah comes home with handkerchiefs more brown than white. It starts here, Steve thinks, and doesn’t stop to wonder why.

 “Maybe you need—” Steve shudders and stops, his lungs rebelling, and the coughs are _harsh_ , shaking his ribs against his skin. “—to read these things to me when I’m _well_.”

 Bucky’s half-smile widens into a grin. He’s got gap teeth, Steve recognizes. There’s a space there, a single blemish in a face that makes dames swoon and old ladies give him extra hamantaschen during Purim. “Sure,” he replies. “I’ll do that in between appointments picking up your dumb ass from the ground in every alley in Brooklyn and working for my uncle, yes?”

 “Your uncle’s a tailor,” Steve reminds him. He doesn’t remember Bucky working for his Uncle Isaac. His brow furrows. “You work for Mr. Rosenthal at the newspaper.”

 Bucky translates things from Yiddish to English, Steve thinks. He’s seventeen, but he’s always been good at languages. Picks them up like they’re programmed into him at birth; as if he’d never been a blank slate but a sponge. He’s smart, so damn smart, but Winifred wants him to play the piano professionally and George thinks he should go to university. They’d been saving since Bucky’s bar mitzvah, and there’s still not enough.

They’ll spend that money on a car in a few months. Right before Sarah dies. Steve doesn’t stop to contemplate this thought.

Bucky’s eyebrow rises, and he shifts his right leg out of its curled-up position, his holey socked foot hitting the Rogers’ dusty wooden floor. “You alright, Stevie?” Bucky asks in a tone laced with worry. “I thought I told you about quitting that job a few days ago?”

Steve sits up so abruptly that his lungs shake against the prison bars of his body. He clutches his stomach, Bucky’s left hand on his shoulder, rough-skinned thumb rubbing soothing circles into the crevices between his bones. Quit, Steve realizes, isn’t _quit_.

He’d spent too many days and nights with Steve, watching while Sarah works in the sick ward, desperate for money for medicine. She works till her back breaks, till her skin stretches across her cheekbones like she’s already dead, wax and freckles and brittle blonde hair.

Steve doesn’t register Bucky moving until there’s a glass pressed to his lips, cool water rushing down his throat as he sips. When the cough stops, Bucky’s got the book open on his lap. “Should I continue?” he asks.

 Steve nods, wordlessly. He’s lost all ability to communicate tonight, always does during the worst of these bouts of flu, pneumonia, bronchitis. His hands shake underneath the blanket, and he’s grateful that Bucky can’t see the trembling digits. There are tears in the corners of his eyes, burning like lightning sparks across the ground.

Bucky clears his throat, and then reads, voice low and fading, “Take courage, my heart: you have been through worse than this. Be strong, saith my heart; I am a soldier; I have seen worst sights than this.”

 

 

 

Steve wakes with Bucky’s name on his lips, and Natasha’s hand on his shoulder, firm and supportive. Her hair is clean, platinum strands that still appear a stranger against her familiar face neat. There’s no ash, no blood, no dirt. No trace of battle on her. She’s looking at him with that familiar look on her face, the one that promises help but not the kind Steve thinks he needs. She’s all that’s left.

Steve thinks that means he should hug her, clutch her close, but he’s frozen. The crick in his neck twinges, but he ignores it. “You have to get up, Rogers,” she tells him. There’s a plate of something in her hands, something that looks like a breakfast of brown mush and it smells sweet. “Eat something.”

For a moment, he sees Peggy, brown hair in curls as she sits across from him in her pressed uniform, voice soft, but he can hear the grief in her voice, too. “He damn well must have thought you were worth it,” Steve remembers her saying, but following him into battle wouldn’t have mattered this time.

There’d been no time for her, too, and the bitterness feels fresh.

 His tongue is heavy lead in his mouth, his heart an Atlas boulder barely held up. He doesn’t even wave Natasha away. She sighs, a sound that doesn’t sound irritated so much as resigned, but Bruce is alive, Steve remembers. It’s been years, and Natasha’d moved on, but maybe now they’d come together in their grief, just like the nights when Steve and Natasha shared a cockroach infested motel bed in Korea, Japan, South Africa, Kenya. Nights when they’d fall asleep with sweaty skin, looking at the same person in the mirror with shuddered gasps and frayed nerves and silent words, and never speak of the broken soldier they’d both known in the back of their minds.

They’d never promised each other anything. None of them, because promises and time were never theirs to give.

He lets his eyes trail over to the window where the sun is shining through, bright and hot and devastating in its intensity. It’s high in the sky, and it hasn’t even been a day. In the distance, the goats bleat.

Steve looks away, then down, and then—

His heart stops. His right palm is open, and there is nothing.

He chokes, mouth open, but nothing comes out, and he can barely hear Natasha call his name.

A _thud_ , and the table rattles against his back, and he looks away, vision blurred, to see her standing up. “You think you’re the only one who lost someone, Rogers?” he hears her say, but the small, petty part of him that’s been festering for _six fucking years since the ice_ lashes out with unadulterated spite.

“What did you lose? You didn’t know him.” Her face tightens into that familiar mask, the one he’d despised when he first met her. The perfect actress, he thinks, and he doesn’t bottle up the cruel words leaving his mouth. “You knew a puppet, a doll they paraded around on fucking strings! Not the boy who used to dance with his sisters on Fridays or teach Arnie Roth to box. You knew nothing. You didn’t lose anything, you didn’t have to watch it, again and again and again!”

Without thought, against his will, he flies up off the ground, and kicks the table. Books fly, hit the wall, pages fluttering in the air with a swish, and the dog tags skitter underneath the stove. His eyes track them, and he moves around her immobile form to try to catch them. They’ve disappeared into the darkness where he can’t follow.

When he turns around, she’s gone, the door open and the plate of food right where she left it.

Wearily, he closes his eyes for a long, dull moment, regret swirling through him as quick as the anger had come. He thinks he should go after her, but he picks up the books instead, almost reverently, and stacks them like a square by threes, the notebooks with Bucky’s memories on top, and the brand-new Tanakh front and center. Then, he sits back down, boots flying off his feet and through the open door until he can barely make out their impression and remains there.

 

 

 

On the second day, the flies buzz around the untouched plate of food, and Steve’s stomach is nothing but acid attacking his innards. The door is still open, and the sky grey as if the universe finally realizes the need to mourn, the deep insistent obligation to weep. His throat is dry and parched, and he thinks about getting water for a moment before he lets it go. When he shifts, his bare toes against the wood that sits with dirt and ash and blood, now, no longer clean, he bends to pick up one of the notebooks.

He’s never read the scribbles. Didn’t think he had the right, didn’t want to see the terror and torture and the pain he couldn’t stop. Guilt swells like a well of water overflowing, and it threatens to drown him.

Holding Bucky’s memories in his hands, he remembers Sam. The guilt grows higher, and he knows deep down how poor a friend he is to dismiss Sam’s death—to leave him _unmourned_ — as if he’d been nothing to him. Sam had been the best friend he’d had in this new century, a man who’d never looked at him as _Captain America_. They’d have liked each other eventually, Steve knows, because they both put up with his shit.

 Sam deserved better than this, Steve thinks, and his breath shudders out another gasp. The notion that his lungs will never breathe properly again hits him, and he wants to laugh, but he doesn’t remember how.

Numbly, he opens the notebook, and sees nothing but a string of Russian letters whose secrets he’ll never be able to read. “Oh, God,” he says, and rubs his eyes. Sleep had not come again the night before.

“You need a shower,” Natasha says in a sharp, biting tone. She’s not glaring, but she looks close to it as she stands in the doorway with a brown bag in her right fist. Grease drips from the bottom to fall on the grass between the outside and the wood on the inside. Steve stares to her through bloodshot, heavy eyes. His beard itches like crazy, his skin still clings to the aftereffects of battle, and it smells like the inside of a gym room in here. Like a Brooklyn summer, he thinks, when the air grew so humid it cooked the refuse in the trash cans into a fragrant, horrible bouquet of pestilence.

It takes a moment before Steve realizes he’s looking at _red_. Her hair is familiar, that deep shade of auburn orange that made him desire a pencil and paint to immortalize every time he stopped to take it in. Once, he dreamed of the two of them, brown against red, skin against skin and black sheets, curled together, and saw his own fingers stained with ink and charcoal as he sketched a mere three feet away.

That would never happen now.

Steve shakes his head, and says, “I can’t.”

 He doesn’t offer anything more, and she doesn’t ask. He doesn’t tell her that Bucky’s shower is too raw a wound, that the high-tech spray of hot water and scented soaps of sandalwood that Shuri provides every three weeks because the long hair took a lot of maintenance just makes him want to drown there. Can’t go in and remember the few times he’d stood, watching a silhouette through steam and glass and heard Bucky teasing him about “that rat’s nest on your face, damnit Rogers, just shave it off, you look like the hobo from down the street back in DUMBO. You know, the one with the trench coat?”

He always talked about memories as if they were questions.

She comes in and puts the bag down on top of one of the books. Then, she picks up the untouched plate and dumps it down the trash which hasn’t been emptied in who knows how long. That smells, too. Everything in the hut is turning stale. The bananas on the counter are near black, and there’s mold on the citrus fruit skins.

Natasha pulls a phone out of her pocket. The screen is cracked, but the battery is still clinging to life. It’s a burner phone, some new number every two weeks, but Steve wonders if there are texts left over from Sam. Sam, and _Wanda_. She holds it straight out against her palm as she kneels behind the books, so near and so far.

“I called Sam’s mother,” she finally offers after the lack of words gets too much. Steve bites his lip and thinks, _that should have been me, I should have called Darlene_. He nods and waits. “She didn’t answer.”

 He closes his eyes, and nods, again, tightly.

 “How many of us are left to mourn?” Natasha asks, as if the day before had been nothing but a bad script written in a movie made under a horrible director that couldn’t tell the difference between art and gimmicky one-liners that fall flat.

“Not enough,” Steve finally answers, and then lets the silence wash over them. He ignores the bag, ignores his stomach, but doesn’t look away from her. She curls up against the stack of books, not touching him, her head in her hands and the fall of her red hair a splash of color against the brown leather of Bucky’s fifth notebook.

Neither of them has ever learned how to grieve properly.

 

 

 

They sit next to one another, her fingers tracing the spines of books, his clutching at others, and barely speak. There’s no mention of Thanos, gone and triumphant and _still fucking living, how dare he be_. They don’t bring up Stark who’s still missing, who might be dead, too, or Thor who’d returned with anger and nothing but stardust and a giant, foreign hammer. She cooks, once, and offers the peanut noodles to him, but he still doesn’t desire the nourishment. She sighs, and for once Steve thinks she believes there’s a fight she can’t manipulate her way through.

 A fight they can’t win.

All across the world, people are mourning. Words are said, rites are performed, but no bodies are left to bury. People go without children, husbands and wives, parents, friends, and enemies. The world is in chaos, and no one can stop it.

Certainly not him.

 

 

 

“He could never balance long enough on his toes,” Natasha informs Steve before she leaves a bucket of water next to the door outside and goes to answer Shuri’s call. Steve refuses to leave the hut, and she doesn’t ask him to. “He wouldn’t have lasted long in the ballet.”

Steve didn’t know this, but he knew it was a message: I loved him, too. He apologizes without words for the exclusion of her grief. She nods abruptly, forgiving but never forgetting, and he watches her shadow on the ground, the sway of her hair, until she disappears beyond the tree line.

He picks up the closed bag left disregarded, and finally eats. Eggs hard-boiled in tomato sauce and something that hits him like fire in the back of his throat. There’s a sourness, too, and he wonders if there’s goat’s milk. He chokes it all down, and then washes it with the cup of water Natasha left there. His stomach rebels with pain, unused to subsistence. Then, limbs aching, he moves, and stares at the door.

The goats bleat weakly, desperately calling for food. They’re calling for _Bucky_. They don't know, but how could they ever know? Goats are not commanded to mourn the dead, do not realize when one they depended on is gone until they, too, are gone.

 It is the fourth day, and the kids have still not come.

 Steve squares his shoulders and rubs at his grimy beard. Then, he sets out to feed the goats. No use letting them die, Steve thinks, Bucky will kill him because Bucky loves these damn goats.

He doesn’t know how long he works, shucking the pen and pouring water in the trowels and feeding the goats. They rub their dirty heads against his palms, grateful for the food. Steve remembers the first day he saw Bucky since the cryo-chamber, when Shuri led him to this farm almost a year ago. “That’s Ari, and Benji, and that stupid one with the crazy look in his eyes is Punk.” Bucky’d grinned at him, and it had been like looking up and seeing the sun. “Go and say hello to him, punk.”

Punk bucks his head against Steve’s hip, demanding more.

When Steve looks up again, he sees a huge man with a pelt of fur around his shoulders walking towards the hut, a dead deer in his grasp.

 Steve stands and waits. The man doesn’t smile when he finally arrives at the goat pen, instead, he drops the corpse onto the ground near Steve’s feet, shucking off his burden. Glassy, unseeing eyes stare up at Steve.

“I heard from the spider woman you’re not eating,” the other man says, and doesn’t introduce himself. Steve remembers him from the battlefield, though. He’d fought well, with fierceness and honor. T’Challa had respected him. “You colonizers never know what you’re doing.”

One huge shoe kicks lightly at the corpse as if to say, _go on, take it, eat and fight and get your revenge_.

He rubs his eyes again, and leaves behind sandpaper. There’s no more tears for him, so what is left but this? “Did you know him?” Steve asks again and indicates the hut. He doesn’t ask if the man mourns his king, because he believes he knows the answer to that. Even out here in the middle of nowhere he can hear the rites performed. Wakanda is a country left to wallow.

And Steve is a selfish man. He wants desperately to know every part of Bucky he can, every moment Bucky had when Steve wasn’t in his life.

The man nods. “I fought him. He was good for a white man. We used to wrestle just over there.” The man points towards the mountains that are far off in the distance. “I wanted to know what was so special about this outsider that the kitten king let him stay.”

 Steve nods. “King T’Challa was a good man.”

 It’s the first time he’s used the moniker.

The man shrugs, as if nonchalant, but Steve can see the deep respect in his eyes. “He had his moments.” The man looks away, back towards the mountains.

Steve is a stranger in a strange land, and he doesn’t know what to say. Doesn’t know if there’s anything he should say.

There’s a long, awkward moment when Steve realizes he doesn’t know this man’s name, nor how to skin or roast a deer because he’s a city boy at heart and he can barely boil cabbage (Sam never let him forget about the time he burned water back at the Avengers compound) and doesn’t even have sticks for a fire and so he doesn’t move. A heartbeat between them, then the man rolls his eyes.

 “Make the vegetarian put the deer on the spit,” he grumbles, but bends and lifts the body anyway. “Only a white man.”

Two hours later, Steve finishes the roasted meat, and asks M’Baku if he has any candles. The man raises an eyebrow, but shrugs, and leaves. Steve doesn’t know if he’ll return. The hut is dark, the moon a half-sliver in the sky. There are lights, because Shuri wouldn’t let Bucky live without electricity. There’s even a set of kimoyo beads, with internet connection and movies and jazz music, everything a man living off the grid could want. Steve leaves the dish in the sink, drinks more water to soothe his rough throat, then moves to the stove. The dog tags are dusty, with crumbs and bits of old food sticking to them. He wipes them off with the Hello Kitty dishrag wrapped around the fridge handle, and then heads to the bedroom.

The bed's still made, soldier precision and corners tight, with four feather pillows, two on each side. There’s a sheet covering the sole mirror that he didn’t put there, and its hits him that Natasha must have come in here. Steve rummages through the drawers, looks for matches and finds none. There’s a lighter, and a pack of empty Newports. By the bed, a familiar looking backpack is shoved half-haphazardly under the frame. He cradles the cigarettes, crumpling the box between his fingers.

“I didn’t think you still smoked, Buck,” he says to the phantom by his side. Remembers how Bucky would never do it in front of him, always careful to keep it away from his lungs in case it exasperated his asthma even though the doctor prescribed him specialized _asthma cigarettes_. Cigarettes for bad lungs and liver every Monday for his anemia. Bucky used to go to his Uncle Daniel’s butcher shop and bring back discarded cuts of meat, because Sarah Rogers couldn’t bother keeping kosher when it cost more than she made, and her boy needed to live.

He tosses the ruined box and it hits the floor with the dullest _thud_. His hand goes through his hair and comes back greasy. He swallows, and collapses on the bed, curls into the fetal position, and thinks about Wanda. There’s a memorial in Brooklyn commemorating Sergeant Barnes near their old Hebrew school, but the world knows Wanda Maximoff as a criminal. Not who she was. There’s a grandfather out there, somewhere, still alive ( _maybe_ ), but Wanda never truly spoke about him. Steve realizes with a sharp pang of regret there’s no one left to mourn her.

 No one but him.

           

 

 

Ghosts comes to him that night. Peggy in her red dress talking about dancing, and Bucky in his perfectly pressed uniform, hat titled just-so on his head. He looks like a cat that ate the cream. They dance together in a bar that looks like an old speakeasy in Brooklyn, red flying around like swan’s wings, and Bucky throws her, laughing, up into the air, and catches her with two strong, flesh arms. Steve leans against the bar and watches the two longest loves of his life with a small, fond smile. Behind him, he hears Nastasha yell, “Stand on your toes, _kotoynok_.”

Over in the corner, with rigid posture, Rebecca Barnes plucks the strings of a violin, her brown hair falling in waves over her shoulders, and her eyes young and soft. Abby’s next to her, her hair still a fall of red, but she’s old and stooped back, with crags for skin, and she’s got a plate of black-and-white cookies. Mimi’s dancing with Gabe in an old-fashioned house dress decorated by daisies, right next to Bucky and Peggy, doing the lindy hop and badly because she was one Barnes born with two left feet, and the Howling Commandos crowd around the dance floor in a circle, glasses high and toasts on their lips. Young and lively and vibrant, Dum Dum’s stupid mustache and all. Howard’s on his knees at the back of the bar, tinkering with a wrench against an old piano.

Sam bows and draws Abby into a dance. It’s a waltz, and Steve didn’t even know he could do that. Wonders when he learned how. The blonde raises his whiskey glass to his lip, saluting Wanda who tosses back vodka like she’d trained under the Black Widow, and her brother who zips across the room for the amusement of his sister, balancing a bowl of _paprikash_ on his silver shock head.

Natasha grabs Steve’s other hand, and giggles as he sways, drunk for the first time in ages. On his left side, all three of his parents, Sarah Rogers and the Barnes’, too, roll their eyes and start to chant, clapping their hands in time with the music Becca plays.

A hand falls heavily on his shoulder and shakes him away from the bar.

“Steve,” it says.

 

 

 

Thor’s haircut is a hack job, Steve thinks, as he notices the bald spots and line marks across his skull. The God of Thunder stands with shuffling feet by the doorway, three candles clutched in his hands. His eyes are red, too, and there’s such a deep chasm of loss in his gaze which threatens to swallow everyone whole that Steve can’t stand to look at him.

 He keeps his eyes trained to his bare feet as he shuffles across the room, takes the offered candles, and then gets the lighter to ignite the flame on the wicks. Five days late, and once again, Steve remembers he’s _never really learned how to grieve properly_.

 He can’t focus, but he stares as the flames reach upwards and billow puffs of smoke into the air. The roof is thatch and straight beams, and perhaps it's dangerous to have an open flame, but there’s nothing for it. He contemplates the shape of them, a knife, a lamb, a ribbon. On and on they go, until the silence breaks.

Thor shuffles around the bedroom, picking up things, because Thor has always been a curious man. Steve thinks about snapping, telling him to stop, leave the boots and the books with the Cyrillic letters and the fucking jar of chocolate spread with a spoon stuck inside it where they were, but doesn’t.

He wants Thor to leave. He doesn’t want to see Thor’s grief, doesn’t want it to cover his own. It’s selfish, and Bucky would smack his head for it, while Sam would sigh and cross his arms, and Wanda would look at him with those sad, soft eyes.

I deserve a little selfishness, Steve thinks, and grits his teeth. More than ten minutes go by, the smoke teetering off as the flames level.

He wants Natasha back, but he knows she won’t come. She needs action. He thinks she’s probably sparring with the Dora Milaje, pounding her anger into the dirt until her fists are like pancakes, until her heart and her lungs are so choked up by expended energy there’s nothing left to mourn past the wailing in her head.

Abruptly, it hits him. Tiredness. Bone deep and unshaking. It’s not fatigue, though. He’s tired of the silence. He turns around to see Thor holding the Tanakh from the living room, tracing the Hebrew letters with his fingers. Thor is clean. He’s had a shower, and his armor is scrubbed of blood and decay. He can probably even read what it says.

 At one-hundred-years old, Bucky spoke twenty-five languages fluently, and another thirty with enough competence to order a sandwich. He read six different alphabets. Twenty-four-year old Bucky would have challenged Thor to a read-off and see which one could translate better, no shame at all with goading a literal god.

 “Bucky’s favorite portion was King David,” Steve tells him, and points to the book. Thor looks to him, confusion in his eyes, but surely Natasha’s mentioned Bucky. Surely Thor knows why Steve’s hidden himself away in this hut in the middle of nowhere with new kitchen appliances and updated amenities in a space that’s still bigger than their rat-trap apartment in ‘39. “There’s this bit—” Steve clears his throat and thinks back to his childhood. “That talks about King Saul’s son, Jonathan.” Thor steps closer, and holds the Tanakh out, but Steve doesn’t move to take it. Instead, he recites, with crystal clear memory, “Jonathan’s soul became bound up with the soul of David; Jonathan loved him as himself.”

Thor nods, and his lips twitch into a smile that’s not really a smile. It’s a tremble, the bottom lip wibbling. “You have lost your soul,” he states. It’s not a question. Thor’s lost his soul, too. No one fights like a man possessed in the manner he’d done against Thanos without being ripped asunder.

Steve nods, and tells him, “I’ve lost him before. I thought—I hoped—I never would again.”

No one should lose someone twice.

 Thor echoes the same. “Loki—well, I know this is not one of his tricks. Still, I turn around and expect to see him behind me. Mocking me for falling for this again.”

Thor sets the Tanakh down onto the bed. It’s still made but rumpled a bit from where Steve shifted in his sleep. He sits on the edge of the bed, and Steve goes to join him. As suddenly as his anger sparked earlier, the desire to share hits him fast and hard and Thor no longer seems like an obtrusion.

 Thor speaks about Loki, and Asgard, and Hela and how everything crumbled into an exploding burst of stardust. Steve speaks about Bucky, their time apart and HYDRA, and neither of them judge the other for the memories they give or the men they mourn. In this moment, on the fifth day, in a small hut in Wakanda, they fill the room with the sorrowful words of their losses in the way of old, weary soldiers. Men who have seen battle and come out from it, whole in body but spirit gone, and can never return to their homes because their homes are gone, too.

“What was it that hobbit said?” Thor asks at one point. They’d both been forced by Tony to watch _Lord of the Rings_. It seems a lifetime ago. “Something about home?”

He’s wringing his right wrist with his left hand, and his lip is chapped.

 “How do you go on,” Steve starts and continues the rest of the quote. Thor looks at him with a slight bit of surprise. Steve waves his hand towards the stack of books in the living room. “Bucky liked that book. He read it to me.”

Natasha, too. Three times during their exile she read a well-worn copy that she carried around with her in a purse that contained a straightening iron, a curler, and a series of items meant to mask her features. Steve never contemplated how it all fit, though Sam used to gape at her like a fish.

 “Women,” he’d mutter with astonishment, and Natasha would correct him with a shark grin.

“Spies.”

 “Humans write much of grief,” Thor acknowledges with a heavy nod. His voice seems to crawl past his throat in a subdued way, not the usual boom and clap of thunder, but a tightrope. “I suppose that is to be expected.”

 _Our short, fleeting lives_ , Steve thinks. David made a lament for Jonathan, he recalls. The verse lay on the tip of his tongue but remains unsaid.

Finally, Steve says, “It helps to know that others feel what we feel.” The dream-memory from nights before comes back to him, and he wonders if that wasn’t a sign. He’s so far from believing in signs that the thought is a surprise.

“I find that revenge is a powerful bandage,” Thor finally says. Those words wash over him like a cold ice bath; before, they’d been two men, now they were soldiers again. Steve has a moment to think ‘here it comes’ before Thor continues, “You should return with me, Steven. There is work to be done and Thanos to destroy.”

“Not yet,” Steve answers, dismissal in his tone.

Thor opens his mouth to argue, but Steve cuts him off with a clenched fist. “Don’t,” he says, and tiny drops of spit fly. “Don’t call me a coward or say I’m shirking my duty. Just go.”

 The god shakes his head. “I’d never call you such, Captain. But what more do you have to lose?” Then, he puts his hand on Steve’s shoulder, squeezes, and turns to retreat through the open door.

 Before he leaves the grounds, Steve hears Thor feed the goats.

 

 

 

The next day, he screams until his voice is hoarse and no one comes. Company is aspirin and when its gone there’s nothing but the ache. The goats bleat, terrified, as Steve tears at the pots and pans, throws them around the room. He rips the curtain at the window, kicks at the fridge door until it collapses inwards, and yanks his undershirt until its shreds, his chest exposed to the heat of the Wakandan air. It’s April, he thinks hysterically, it shouldn’t be _this fucking hot_.  When he’s done, he drinks water and eats stale cereal and sits back amongst the stack of books. No dreams come to him that night because sleep eludes him, and anger burns a pit into his stomach as cruel as hunger.

He goes into the bedroom, small enough that he can cross the room in ten steps and opens the trunk that houses Bucky’s clothes. There’s a pair of well-worn sandals that Bucky liked to practice dancing in. “Memories,” he’d say, spinning around, while Steve clapped, the sound of the blues a nostalgic boon in the cool night air. “I think?”

Steve caresses the worn leather, and moves the clothes around, until he gets to the bottom. There’s a pair of sweatpants with his old shield stitched on the right thigh Sam had gotten as a gag gift. With a wink, the other man had tossed them at him and said, “I think the badger will appreciate them.”

Steve takes off his uniform pants, and it feels like they’re crawling off. They stick to him with dried blood and rust. Underneath, his skin is still pale, and his boxers itch. He shucks them, too.

He crawls into the worn sweatpants, and then back into the bed, and dreams of ghosts again.

 

 

 

 On the seventh day, he takes a shower. The water turns nearly black, almost sludge like, as a thousand pounds of dirt and excrement and the innards of creatures fall down the drain to disappear. He uses the sandalwood soap, until he smells like Bucky, until every inch of his skin is red and raw underneath the white. He doesn’t feel lighter as he wraps the towel around his waist, checks the candles are still burning, puts on Bucky’s white, cotton nightshirt, then goes to feed the goats. When Punk bats his furry head against Steve’s palm, a choked sob wells up behind his teeth, and Steve sinks his knees down into the dirt, clutching the stupid, whining goat hard against his chest as his body continues to shudder, lungs collapsing under the week of stress and loneliness. He thought he’d cried out all his tears, thought there couldn’t possibly be anything less in this broken shell of a man. He feels sick, his stomach a pit of nausea, and he releases the goat long enough to stumble outside of the pen, hand gripping tightly against one of the wooden beams as his body expels what little he ate today.

He doesn’t feel better.

He just feels angry.

 

 

 

M’Baku shows up again the morning after, sans deer corpse this time, but with a middle-aged woman that looks like she could have taken him pre-serum into a headlock in two seconds. She stares at the goats unblinkingly.

“She has come to take care of them,” M’Baku tells him unnecessarily. Steve nods.

“Thank you,” he tells her, forgetting that she might not speak English. He repeats it in Xhosa. She nods sharply, and then gets to work.

Steve leaves Bucky’s books and kimoyo beads, but wears his dog tags as he follows M’Baku back to the palace where Shuri—is she Queen Shuri now? Steve wonders, and doesn’t know—and her mother wait for him. They nod respectfully, and Shuri gives him a small, sad smile and he remembers that she lost her brother, too. Her hair is pulled back into buns, but her eyes speak of many sleepless nights.

  “Your friends are waiting for you,” Shuri tells him after they exchange their condolences. “Come.”

It’s an order, and Steve knows how to follow them. The first thing he sees is a raccoon cradling a gun, scowling down at it as if it holds ninety-nine of his problems. Then, he sees Natasha’s familiar figure leaning against the wall of one of the conference rooms, the wall that is nothing but a bunch of windows overlooking the damaged city, and she smiles when she catches his eyes.

“Alright, Rogers?” she asks. He sighs, and then goes to grab her hand and engulf her in a hug. They stand there for a stolen moment before someone clears their throat.

Steve turns around, one arm still around Natasha, and sees Thor standing with his arms crossed behind—

 _Tony_.

He expects anger, accusations, even a slight, from the other man, but Steve can’t bring himself to care. His breath catches in his throat, relief floods through him, and Tony looks terrible, beard unkempt, red eyes full of a sort of hollow decay that must be reflected in his own. Tony opens his mouth, and Steve squares his shoulder, bracing himself for it because two years _can’t_ have softened the blow, he thinks a tad bit sullenly, but then Tony suggests, “So, who’s up for fixing this mess and kicking that gigantic purple grapefruit into hell?”

One by one, Okoye and M’Baku and Shuri and Ramona, Natasha and Bruce and Rhodey and Thor, the raccoon with the gun, and, finally, Steve, raise their hands. They crowd around the table for hours, schematics and notes and suggestions back and forth, until long into the night, and in the distance, Steve thinks he can hear the goats continuing to bleat.

 


End file.
